


The Last Will and Testimony of General Narti Lotorssystir

by Chronolith



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Rashomon Effect, Unreliable Narrator, narti-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 10:52:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14932862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chronolith/pseuds/Chronolith
Summary: "[T]he Rashomon effect is not only about differences in perspective. It occurs particularly where such differences arise in combination with the absence of evidence to elevate or disqualify any version of the truth, plus the social pressure for closure on the question."Or, three retellings of the death of General Narti Lotorssystir.





	The Last Will and Testimony of General Narti Lotorssystir

_All stories are an endless game of playing two truths and a lie._

_They’ll tell you a story._

_And then I’ll tell you the story._

_Spot the lie._

///

“If I ask you a question,” she asks in her hoarse whisper-rasp voice that sounds like the feeling of sandpaper along concrete. “Will you lie?”

Acxa considers this. She considers giving the soldier’s lie, because it would be expected. The ‘no, ma’am’ sits fat and heavy on her tongue like a frog on a wet road. It would be _easy_. But Haggar does not reward the expected or the easy. There’s something like a warning in the way the witch holds her head, in the subtle narrowing of her golden eyes. 

This is not a question.

“It depends upon the question,” Acxa replies—then, after a moment’s consideration, adds: “Ma’am.”

Haggar snorts—a soft, delicate sound, so faint it could almost be mistaken for a glitch in the ship’s air filtration systems. “An unexpectedly diplomatic answer, General,” she says in the same whisper-rasp that gives no indication of her satisfaction or lack thereof with the answer. “You are an interesting creature.”

There is always a fine line to walk with the Empire’s witch—too interesting and one risks becoming a permanent guest in her labs, not interesting enough and she just kills one out of simple spite and boredom. It’s a line Acxa is learning to walk if not with grace then at least with deftness. She shrugs.

“I am a soldier,” she says. “I was not trained to be diplomatic.”

Haggar looks back at her over one shoulder, expression thoughtful. Acxa schools her face into careful neutrality. “You have a habit of honesty,” Haggar remarks after a long moment of consideration. “It is interesting, given your previous command.”

“And my current one,” Acxa responds. “Ma’am.”

That earns her a laugh—high and surprisingly sweet, breaking into an infectious little giggle at the end. Haggar turns to regard her fully, head cocked like some predatory bird. “Indeed,” she agrees, fangs just peeking out from the curled edges of her smile. “Indeed. And you do not try to argue that honesty is a virtue.”

Acxa considers this as well. Haggar seems content to let her sit in contemplative silence and returns to her arcane puttering. “I do not think of myself as honest,” Acxa admits after a time. Haggar makes an interested noise in the back of her throat but does not bother to turn. “I believe I am merely … precise.”

That does get the witch to abandon her latest whimsy and regard Acxa with her odd glowing gaze—quintessence poisoning, advanced stages if Lotor’s research had been correct—and yet Haggar never showed any signs of the mental degradation that generally characterizes such high levels of toxicity. 

“Precise,” the witch echoes. “Such interesting answers you give to questions that others would supply such rote responses you would think they were still at the Academy.”

“I do not think,” Acxa replies, willing her heart to beat slow and steady. There is always a creeping edge of danger to the witch, a trip-switch feeling of threat, and the feeling swells like the humidity of a summer night before a storm as Haggar watches her lazily. “You would tolerate rote for very long. Ma’am.”

That earns her knife-edge smile, a surprisingly beautiful expression on the witch’s narrow face—like a sunrise on the winter morning of the day you know you will die. “Indeed,” she rasps, “I will not.”

Acxa nods because this is expected. There is a dance in their relationship, an endless game of subtle threat and hidden danger. Tip too far one way and Haggar slaughters her sisters. Tip too far the other and Acxa has leverage to sell her out to the Defenders of the Universe or Lotor. (Acxa is uncertain which Haggar fears more. She’s not sure Haggar knows.) So, they teeter together like performers on a high wire. Acxa finds it strangely compelling in ways she’d rather not consider too deeply. 

Haggar slowly tips her head to one side as they consider each other. The air between them heavy and expectant—a queer parody of the type of breathless anticipation that lingers between new lovers. “So,” the witch says slowly as if tasting the word. “If I ask you a question will you be … precise?”

“It depends upon the question,” Acxa repeats, and then smiles so deeply she can feel her dimples show. “I may just lie.”

“Would lying not be imprecise?” Haggar wonders aloud. “Could one have a very precise lie? It is an interesting hermeneutical question, is it not?”

Acxa shrugs. “I was not trained in philosophical methodologies,” she says. “It will have to be a question you put to your druids.”

Haggar snorts. “You continue to find very subtle ways of being snide, General.”

“I am merely informing you of the limitations of my training,” Acxa responds. “I would not wish to provide substandard service because you were unaware of my short comings.”

Haggar makes a sound that’s the confused bastard of a snort and a laugh. “Of course not, that would be imprecise, wouldn’t it?” She waves away any response Acxa might have at the ready (Acxa has none) and folds her hands into a contemplative steeple. “Will you tell me in your cold and precise way what became of General Narti Lotorssystir, or will you lie?”

Whatever question Acxa might have anticipated, whatever dangerous fishing expedition she thought the witch might engage in, this is not it. Something small and fragile under her breast bone screams—has never stopped screaming since that first bright splash of blood painted the cruiser’s deck—and Acxa takes a long, slow breath.

“I wrote a report,” she says. “Ma’am.”

Haggar dismisses this with a flick of her claws. “Reports lack the _viscerality_ of oral testimony, do they not?”

Acxa wills herself to nod, short and control. “Yes, ma’am.”

The expression that slides across Haggar’s face is nothing so simple as a smile—it is the predatory anticipation of a cat with a small, wounded bird, a snake with a paralyzed mouse—the expression of a woman who knows she has what she wants precisely where she wants it and will take pleasurable time enjoying it. She makes a small gesture with both her hands. “If you would, General,” she says as sweet as spiced honey. “Tell me the last story of General Narti Lotorssystir.”

///

_It is, in fact, possible to tell a precise lie._

_What else is a forgery but a very precise lie? So precise that sometimes even the original pales before it._

_Truthfulness and preciseness in testimony, however, have never enjoyed a direct correlation._

///

“If I ask a question, will you tell me a lie?” Allura asks.

She’s glorious like this—her hair a cloud across the pillows, sweat gleaming in the valley between her breasts, and her lips a deep bitten red. If Lotor had any skill with a pen he’d draw her languid sprawled form. 

He knows the proper answer is that he would never lie to her. That, for her, he would always be simple and honest. But somehow, he doubts that either one of them could get through such a declaration with a straight face. They understand one another a little too well for such a sweet lie.

“I might,” he replies as he traces arcane and obscure symbols over the soft skin of her stomach, the long lines of her thighs. “But you already know this.”

Allura hums her agreement and stretches under his wandering fingers like a cat, all lithe muscle and hidden lethality. “Sometimes its worthwhile to ask the obvious question just to hear how the answer is shaped,” she says sweetly. “Sometimes the obvious holds interesting … deviations.”

He catches her around her waist and tugs, so she falls in a lazy flop across his chest. She taps his nose with one finger and grins until she dimples. He’s not in love with her. (Not yet.) But something in the way she tilts her head at him, curious and predatory, something in the way she drags one slender finger along the column of his neck catches at the edges of his heart.

It’s easy to see why her Paladins—even the one indulging in some sort of personal sojourn with the Blades of Mamora—are so dedicated to her ideals, if not to her personally. She burns with light and conviction and an easy sort of grace that Lotor hungers for as if he were dying. There is something in her that makes him almost feel as if he could lower his walls and his defenses.

Almost.

“And what has prompted this sudden fit of curiosity,” he asks as she finger combs out his hair.

Allura hums low in her throat and he feels it rumble across his sternum where they lie pressed chest to chest. She props herself up on her elbows to consider him, something sharp and speculative in her eyes. 

“Nothing much,” she replies easily. “I just realized I know very little about you and you know so much about me.”

“Do I really,” he rejoins, quick to deflect. “I am not at all convinced that is a true statement.”

Allura’s dimples show once again, deceptively charming. “True enough for the moment.”

Lotor resists the urge to make a childish face at her. “I not entirely sure truth works in half measures.”

“Quarter measures, then?” Allura teases. “Three fourths on a klick?”

He rolls to pin her underneath him as she giggles, pleased with herself and the universe at large for this moment. He kisses her because he can, and she returns it with an intensity that he finds flattering every time. 

Flattering and dangerous.

“I definitely know truth doesn’t work like _that_ ,” he says, and she makes a face at him. 

She squirms her hand between them and grins at his sudden intake of breath her fingers move sure and tantalizing around him. “And does it work like this then?” She asks with an impish curl of her lips.

“Something certainly does,” Lotor agrees, breathless and fighting the urge to squirm. “I thought you had a question?”

“I do,” Allura agrees, her lips ghosting over the tender spot at the hollow of his throat. “Tell me how Narti died?”

Lotor’s blood freezes into ice.

///

_The problem with love is it makes liars of us all eventually._

_Tiny lies, white lies, lies told with nothing but the gentlest of intentions, but they all add up until the bill is due and one has to hope one has enough dividends in trust to settle it._

///

“Our plans have not changed,” Lotor says with a smirk curling around the edges of his lips. An expression that doesn’t quite meet his eyes.

Worry trips up Acxa’s spine, down along her nerves, as she watches Lotor stride away from them. Tension draws his shoulders into a hard, sharp line. Whatever reassuring words he might have for Ezor she knows when Lotor is hiding things—and whatever he’s hiding now is something beyond mere anxiety at facing his monster of a father.

“Narti,” Lotor calls over one shoulder. “Come with me.”

Ezor manages not to roll her eyes through such a prodigious feat of will that Acxa can see the strain it puts on her entire face. She makes a face at Acxa when she catches her watching. They all know Narti is not exactly Lotor’s favorite—that’s too easy a word—but the one he turns to when he’s nervous, when he’s unsettled. 

Narti half turns and clicks her claws together twice, sharp and tinkling before cocking her head to the side. Acxa makes the same gesture back to her.

The worries eat at her still as her sister walks away—her spine a proud line, chin up and shoulders firm, confidence in every step. Acxa wants to believe that together they could meet any threat, but as she watches Narti walk away all she can feel is cold.

///

Haggar makes an interested noise in the back of her throat—soft and terrifying. She holds up a vial full of something that fills the glass with curling smoke and eerie purple light. “So, he always chose Narti for these types of outings?”

Acxa grimaces at the phrasing before she can smooth her expression into something flat and professionally neutral. “Not always,” she responds for the sake of precision. “But often.”

“Were you jealous?” Haggar asks—the question delivered so blandly, as if asking about the state of the ion flux canons, that Acxa honestly doesn’t even register it for a moment.

She blinks. “No?”

“No?” Haggar echoes before turning to regard her. Acxa can’t make out her expression from within the depths of her hood. That might be, Acxa thinks, a good thing given the current circumstances. They stare at each other in thoughtful silence.

“Is there a reason it should have made me jealous?” Acxa asks after the silence drags on into awkwardness. 

She’s learned that stilted silences can be deadly when it comes to the Empire’s witch.

Haggar’s smile is subtle and terrifying. “I suppose not,” she says in her husky rasp. “If you did not feel it.”

///

There’s something deeply infantilizing about being forced to scamper back to his father’s command dreadnaught on the merest whim. Lotor’s grip tightens around the controls of the ship until Narti reaches out and runs one claw over his tense forearm. The click where it catches on the edges of his armor is subtly and surprisingly musical. 

He inclines his head towards her and she lets the ends of his hair tangle around the tips of her claws.

Kova’s purr is suddenly very loud inside small confines of their ship. 

Lotor blows out a long breath and rolls his shoulders.

Narti’s claws tap out another small song along his forearm. Claws plucking at the metal seams in exactly the right way to send ringing tones bouncing around the cockpit, echoing oddly. It’s a small thing but it makes him smile every time. Narti’s moments of high spirited playfulness something he collects like a dragon’s hoard of gold.

“We best not keep my lord father waiting,” he says and Narti flicks her claws dismissively.

“And better to keep that opinion to yourself,” he warns her. “My protection has never been worth much in the face of his wrath.”

Lotor gets the distinct impression that if Narti had eyes, she’d be rolling them. As it is, she bows low before him and ushers him out the little ship with such obsequiousness that he can’t help but laugh.

///

“You were friends?” Allura asks and he frowns at the naked surprise in her tone.

“Is that so shocking,” he asks from where he’s retreated up against the headrest of her massive bed. He resists the urge to clutch a pillow to him like a distressed child, but it’s a near thing. 

Allura rolls to one side and props up her head with one hand to consider him. Her smile is very soft, and she doesn’t try to touch him. “A little bit,” she says. “But then nearly everything about you is a surprise. You did spend several months trying to kill me and my paladins.”

Lotor stiffens. “I wasn’t trying to _kill_ you,” he clarifies. “I just had … priorities that were counter to yours at that particular moment in time.”

Allura coughs, sputters and then gives up and just laughs at him. Lotor blinks. This is, he feels, not at all the response that one could reasonably expect from such a statement. Allura presses her face into the pillows as laughter shakes her slender shoulders. His thoughts are momentarily derailed by the dark, golden glow of her skin and the way her muscles move under her skin. When her laughter slows, and she finally turns her head to consider him again he feels odd inside his own skin—awkward and clumsy in ways he’s not felt in centuries.

“Yes, well,” she sighs. “I imagine our priorities of staying alive and your priorities of killing us were at an impasse at that point in time.”

He frowns at her. “While it is true that I would not have been particularly, ah, put out had Voltron met an untimely demise, your discontinuance was not my highest priority. That was finding a way to free my people from the systems of oppression that have been set over them.”

Allura props herself up on her elbows. “Have you ever noticed, El, that your diction becomes much more formal the more flustered and unsure you feel?”

///

_The trouble with Lotor is that he lies as easily as breathing and his tells are so subtle you can only spot them if you know him like you know your own name._

_Once you know him, they are as obvious and unsubtle as brick through a window._

_But you have to remember: he enjoys having other people think that they know him._

///

Acxa’s certain the only reason she’s got any sort of reputation for patience is by sheer proximity to Ezor’s constant, roiling exuberance, Zethrid’s explosive energy and Narti’s tendency to encourage both of them to higher degrees of ridiculousness at any given moment. Patience is not a virtue she’s ever known herself to possess. And if she ever did, it has certainly abandoned her now as she sits in ill-contained impatience.

Exor reaches out and wraps her hands around Acxa’s drumming fingers and then gives her big, concerned eyes. “Acxa,” she says sweetly. “If you don’t stop drumming your fingers on the consoles, I am going to break them.”

Acxa sighs out a breath on a five count before tugging on her fingers. Exor holds fast.

“I will break them into itty, bitty bits and then Lotor will be all huffy that we have to put you in a pod to fix you so don’t make me do that,” she continues, voice as sweet as honey. “Okay?”

“She’s worried,” Zethrid says from where she’s sprawled all over one of the command chairs, a tablet balanced on her face. “Let her drum if she wants to, at least she can carry a beat. Unlike you.”

Ezor whirls in a tight spin and presses a hand to her slender chest. “You _dare_.”

Zethrid picks up the tablet to eye Ezor lazily. “To tell the truth? Yes.”

“I am the most musically gifted of any of us,” Ezor hisses.

Zethrid rolls her eyes expressively. “That’s taking the bar and burying at the molten core of the nearest planet and then being excited that you can walk over it no matter where you are on the surface,” Zethrid holds up one broad hand and counts down on thick fingers. “Lotor trying to sing sounds like you took Kova, stomped on her tails and then remixed it. Acxa might actually be allergic to anything approximating fun”—Acxa rolls her eyes at this and flips them both off—“ and while I have a gorgeous baritone”—both Acxa and Ezor snort loudly at this—”I have no sense of melody and freely admit this. You, however,” Zethrid points her last finger at Ezor and shakes it. “You couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. In ten buckets! In fact, you take the buckets and drill holes in them and then loudly proclaim you have revolutionized the bucket.”

Acxa and Ezor both blink at her.

“I think that metaphor got away from you. Just a little bit,” Acxa says after a while.

///

Haggar laughs her high, sweet laugh again, tapering off into a tittering giggle. Ice slides down Acxa’s spine and she breathes out a slow breath, willing her heart to beat slow and easy.

The witch half turns from where her experiments smoke lazily on a bench. “Well,” she says slowly. “It is indeed gratifying that your sisters’ behavior is consistent regardless of their employer.”

Acxa bows low. “Ma’am,” she says. “If they have caused—”

“Hush, girl,” Haggar says not unkindly. “I do not find their high spirits cause for offense.”

This does not at all settle Acxa’s nerves. Anxiety and fear tangle together, cold and nauseating, in her belly and she gives another little bow.

“You over saw the construction of Lotor’s ships?” Haggar asks, her voice worryingly clear of suspicion or even curiosity. She could be asking about the weather.

“Yes, ma’am,” Acxa says. “I wrote a report.”

“Indeed,” Haggar replies as she turns back to her workbench. “So you did.”

///

_Poor Acxa._

_She worries over everything. But never over the right things._

///

Lotor can’t stop the way his eyes widen when the doors open to reveal Haggar in all her hunched and eerie glory. Kova rasps out a low growling noise and he can feel Narti stiffen beside him. 

“Welcome, Prince Lotor,” she says in her low and insinuating tone. An insult hovers at the bare edges of her words. “Please, follow me.”

His father’s pet witch does not bother to wait to see if they comply. She makes her slouching, shuffling way down the wide corridors of his father’s dreadnaught as if she commands it herself. Haggar’s a small, wretched form dwarfed by the sheer echoing size of the halls—a legion could march down them three a breast and still have room left over—but the witch is backlit by her own roiling power. Nauseous discomfort floods him as he watches her slow procession.

Narti half turns to him, anxiety writ in every line of her form.

_Does she know?_ she signs with her claws kept close to her thigh. Kova rasps another distressed sound and Narti reaches up to reassure him.

_No,_ he signs back, hands held low and moving as subtlety as he can. _I don’t think so._

Narti turns to follow Haggar. As she does, she signs again-- _I don’t like this._

He doesn’t sign back. They must follow Haggar or be caught out. Narti trails after him, a ghost at his heels, her fear and anxiety tugging at him the entire way.

///

Allura hums tunelessly as she thinks. She’s spread out across her bed, careful not to touch him, propped up on her elbows as she listens. Her gaze rests somewhere over his right shoulder and Lotor is a pathetically grateful for that semblance of distance.

“Was Narti always uncomfortable around Haggar?” She asks, head cocked cutely.

He startles at the question. “I … am uncertain,” he says slowly trying to remember. Most of his interactions with his father’s witch had been wrapped up in trying to avoid becoming one of her projects. He finds memories of her difficult to consider too closely, his mind skittering from them like some small prey animal from a coiled snake. “That was the only time she said something specific.”

Allura traces random designs across the sheets, a small furrow between her brows. “Hm,” she says and then lapses into silence.

“Hm?” He echoes intelligently.

Allura gives him a little shrug. “Just thinking.”

Lotor tries to ignore how this makes his stomach flip with nerves. “About what, if I may inquire?”

She rolls over onto her back, slots her fingers together and pushes them sharply outward with the sound like someone biting down on a mouthful of ice cubes. He can’t help the face he makes in response. She laughs, the sound surprisingly low and husky. “Finish telling me the story and I’ll let you know.”

///

_Lotor has always wanted someone who could match him—strategy for strategy, gambit for gambit—but now that he has her, he doesn’t quite know what to do._

_It would be funny if it weren’t so sad._

///

Acxa frowns at the little message that blinks up at her from her private console. It’s not like Narti to send tight-band, encrypted messages while on the dreadnaught. It’s too risky, too likely to reveal their private frequencies to Zarkon—or anyone else who might feel the need to listen in.

‘Something is wrong,’ it reads. ‘Be careful.’

Ezor looks up and cocks her head. “What’s up?” She asks. “You have your ‘I’m worried’ face on.”

“That’s just my face,” Acxa replies and wipes the message. “I’m always worried.”

///

“You didn’t tell your sisters?” Haggar asks. “It seems that choice was … unwise.”

Acxa bites back a grimace, drawing in a slow breath to keep her face clear, because Haggar’s observation is one she’s already excoriated herself over a million times before. It’s a game of what ifs that she’s played inside her own head and each ending is the same.

She should have said something. Anything.

But she didn’t and Narti died at the hands of the one person Acxa had given her loyalty to over everything else. A loyalty he had ultimately betrayed, bloodily betrayed, and she isn’t even the one to bear the price of that poor choice. It’s a hard truth that cuts deep and the wound seeps blood over everything that Acxa does.

Acxa raises her chin and looks over Haggar’s right shoulder. “As I discovered,” she says evenly. “Ma’am.”

Haggar cocks her head slowly to the side as if considering a new and interesting specimen for study. It’s a gesture of which she seems particularly fond. Acxa’s watched her use it against more than one willful commander and watched how they wilted under that cool gaze. She fights the urge to sigh and keeps her gaze locked on the middle distance over Haggar’s shoulder until the witch huffs.

“Well,” she says in her rasping whisper. “You made a number of unwise decisions before you came to me. But it is of no concern now. We can correct them.”

Acxa’s almost amused that the empire’s most fearsome creature can be so petty. Almost.

///

_The one lie that Acxa always tells is this: that she has everything under control._

_She tells it to everyone. She especially tells it to herself._

_It gets her into trouble every time._

///

Narti keeps pace as Lotor gives every appearance of slinking back to his ship with his tail tucked firmly between his legs.

He is humiliated, bitterly so, but unsurprised. This is the third time he’s asked—the third time he’s _begged_ \--for his father to look at him. To see him for the asset that he knows he could be. And it is the third time his father has rejected him entirely. Lotor finds its easier to steel his resolve with that history stretched before him. 

So many stories contained a question asked three times and if rejected on the third, never asked again. He will not ask again.

Narti pauses and he pauses with her.

He follows her gaze to the shadowed observation decks over the hangers. A chill washes over him, a subtle prickling along his spine, but he sees nothing to cause alarm.

_Narti?_ He signs her name, a small secret gesture just for her.

She turns back to him and shakes her head. _Nothing_ , she signs back. _An odd feeling, as if I was being watched by a ghost._

Lotor frowns. It’s not like Narti to wax poetic, particularly not when they are in the depths of his father’s domain. _Oddly specific,_ he signs while he scans the hangers once again. The shadows stay deep and inscrutable. _But fitting for this place._

Narti clicks her claws together, a little gesture of amusement, before signing. _I want to be gone from here._

While he often agrees with Narti and her sharp logic, he has never agreed so much with her as in that moment. _Yes,_ he replies and then gives her a little bow. _Lead the way?_

Narti’s shoulders shake in her silent mirth and she slips past him with a sly bounce to her steps.

It’s the last time he’ll see her playful and amused and he doesn’t even know it.

///

There’s a gentle touch, a finger running over his forearm light and tentative. Lotor looks up at Allura’s entirely too sympathetic face.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Losing someone—” she blows out a breath that moves the hair around her face “—it always hurts. I shouldn’t have asked, and you don’t have to continue.”

He’s not sure what expression his face wears, but he can hear the bitterness in his laughter like jagged glass catching at him. “I didn’t lose Narti, Princess,” he says with icy dignity. “I killed her.”

Allura’s eyes widen and her mouth pops open with a little ‘o’ of surprise.

///

_There is a phrase: “to cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face.”_

_The phrase was created just for Lotor._

///

Ezor is sympathetic and her odd mix of horribly blunt but strangely gentle as Lotor and Narti stride into the room.

Lotor’s fast to hide his hurt under a veneer of arrogant disdain. His chin goes up as his mouth twists into a self-deprecating, sly smile. “I’m afraid I was relieved of my command, yes,” he says coolly, and she loves this about him—his ability to take his hurt, his humiliation, and forge it anew into a weapon. 

She doesn’t smile at him and he doesn’t expect her to, but she turns and meets that proud, cool gaze with her own. “The second ship is complete and ready for testing,” she tells him plainly. He raises one eyebrow, and somewhere in that carefully calm expression is amusement. “The sentries are just making some minor adjustments.”

“Excellent!” He proclaims, and if his words are just a little too loud, a little too emphatic, well, they can all ignore that for right now.

Acxa half turns to bring up the screens for Lotor to inspect himself, but he watches her instead—eyes almost too bright, near manic, and his expression fixed in that little half smile. “Sixty percent of the comet’s materials were used in the production of the ships,” she says, maintaining the illusion of distant professionalism. “We will have more than enough for the creation of the third ship.”

Part of her alights with the warm glow of the pleasure of a thing done well when Lotor looks at her and commends her work as if he could never imagine that she would do anything other than a perfect job. She takes that pleasure and stuffs it in a small, tightly contained jar for later introspection

Acxa’ll wonder later if, had she been paying more attention to her sister, if she would have caught the clues that Lotor was about to betray their loyalty. That he could so coldly strike down one of their own on the mere suggestion of disloyalty. But Acxa doesn’t pay attention to Narti. Later, in her moments of bitter introspection, she finds she can barely recall where Narti stood, her posture, anything at all. Narti had faded into the background and Acxa had let her.

It’s a regret that will follow her like the most faithful of hounds for the rest of her life. 

Instead her focus is on Lotor, his tightly contained manic energy and the sharp edge of self-destruction lurking right under his skin. Acxa wishes it wasn’t so, but Lotor has always been her auto-focus, the world orienting itself to that sharp perspective—and Narti, quiet Narti, had dropped out of the frame.

///

The witch hums tunelessly as she listens. The way she drums her fingers against her work table sets a counterpoint to Acxa’s own erratic heartbeat. “Was General Narti Lotorssystir often involved in these … experiments of Prince’s Lotor’s?” She asks slowly. “It seems she was indeed a great favorite of his.”

Acxa bites down, hard, on her cheek to keep the bitter laughter that wants to spill from her like spoiled wine in check. “I do not think,” she says carefully. “That Lotor has any favorites. At least not when it comes to _people_.”

Haggar lifts one slender hand to cup Acxa’s cheek gently. Her fingers are very cold. “Poor girl,” she says, so quiet and so soft. “You are remarkably careless with your heart for all of your precision.”

There’s a small, treacherous part of her that wants to turn her face into the witch’s palm, to let Haggar bring the chaos of her life back into focus again. She shoots the impulse, twice, and waits for it to stop twitching before replying coolly. “I do not see what my heart has to do with things, ma’am.”

Haggar sighs, the trembling flutter of a dying leaf on a small wind, and drops her hand. “No,” she says. “I suppose you would not.”

///

_Acxa is careless with her heart. She doesn’t realize it, but she always is._

_The thing with children who were cast into the cold and the dark is that they will find a way to feel warmth, even if it means setting everything around them on fire._

///

Honestly, Lotor doesn’t know what he was thinking, expecting for his moment of triumph to go unnoticed and unmolested by his father. He ought to have seen the attack coming because his father’s reaction is as predictable as the gravitational distortions around a neutron star—and as destructive. 

He raises Zethrid on comms to demand a situation report, but he already knows the answer.

Her teeth are bared in a feral, furious grimace as she bites out: “A Galra fleet is attacking us!”

Lotor’s mind spins with plans and contingency plans to bring the situation under control. A single fleet they can deal with, crush into find dust to drift across the cosmic winds, but the resulting fall out….

“Wait,” Zethrid says as her hands fly across the controls. “There’s another fleet. And another one!”

He listens to her rising panic and draws in a steadying breath. If they give into hysteria here there will be no hope for any of them. Lotor pulls himself up and straightens his shoulders. Kova jumps on Narti’s shoulders, whiskers twitching, but she gives no additional analysis.

He takes odd comfort in the way they fall in around him, like a phalanx looking into place. “We’re leaving,” he announces and hopes that his words aren’t a lie.

///

“We were there, you know,” Allura interrupts. He blinks at her dumbly, caught in his own memories. “When your father sent the fleets to attack you. Pidge and her brother had found a way to decrypt Galra fleet communications. We could see the fleet mobilization, but not why.”

“And you, what, flew out because you were curious?” Lotor asks with baffled disbelief.

She turns her head and smiles. “Yes.”

He looks away from her for a moment and then rakes a hand through his hair. “That,” he starts and then shakes his head. “That was extremely reckless.”

Allura shrugs expressively—difficult to do flat on one’s back, but she makes it work. “I wanted to go defend and help whoever Zarkon was attacking, but I was outvoted.”

“An enemy of your enemy is your friend,” Lotor asks incredulously. It’s such an innocent approach to the universe that the concept, much less acting on it, baffles him.

She pokes his knees. “Well, aren’t you?”

///

_People are honest in two situations: when they believe they have power such that the truth cannot hurt them, or when they trust the listener._

_Honesty, at a certain level, requires trust._

_Or at least it does for Lotor._

///

The ship rolls under Acxa’s feet, heaving like a great dying beast, nearly throwing her to her knees. Her sisters totter like puppets whose puppeteers have forgotten how to pull their strings. The sentries maintain their rigid formation with a machine’s disregard for its own impending destruction.

“How did they find us!” She, much to her chagrin, yelps. 

“We must have been tracked,” Zethrid responds as she stares warily up at the creaking support beams.

But Acxa knows better. She watches Lotor’s face move through more expressions in the span of thirty ticks than she can remember seeing over the course of hours—weirdly and innocently unguarded in his alarm.

Exor catches her eye and shakes her head, just once, hard. They both know that Lotor would never allow himself to be tracked—at least not by any mere technological method. They were meticulous.

The factory ship shudders through another round of sustained fire. Proximity alarms blare in cacophonous counterpoint to the alerts of a failing life support system. It’s a mystery that will have to be solved later, Acxa decides, if they linger they will die.

But Lotor is turning, confusion transfiguring into rage. His face is a rictuses mask of disbelieving fury, all sharp lines and skin pulled tight over fine bones. The expression on his face as he turns to stare down their sister is a horror.

Acxa is just starting to turn, eyes widening with concern, because _no_ , there is _no way_ that Narti would betray them. Never. Not willingly. When Lotor bursts past her, a whirlwind of desperation and furious terror. 

///

The witch’s sigh is soft and sad, like the first brush of winter through autumn leaves. “So hasty,” she murmurs, as if she’s forgotten Acxa is even there. Haggar smooths down the sleeves of her robe. “For a man who has lived long millennia Prince Lotor is remarkably … quick with his decisions.”

Something hot and choking burns in Acxa’s throat. She snaps her head to the side and stares hard at the floor.

Gentle, icy fingers through her hair startle her back to the present. “Poor girl,” she sighs. “He broke your very precise heart.”

Acxa swallows, can feel herself choke back the bile and the rage, and raises her chin. “Is my report sufficient,” she asks. She’s pathetically grateful when Haggar does not mention the ragged, hoarse edge to her voice. “Ma’am?”

She keeps her chin up and her gaze fixed just above Haggar’s head as the witch finger combs the short hair at the nape of her neck. She closes her eyes, a little flutter of surrender, when the witch brushes the backs of her knuckles against Acxa’s cheek—so sweet and sinister.

“More than,” says the witch in her gentle rasping whisper. “Thank you for your report, Acxa.”

///

“We must have been tracked!” Zethrid snaps, her eyes sweeping the hanger bay as if she could find the source and rip it apart with her bare hands.

Lotor appreciates the sentiment, but he knows—he _knows_ \--that there is no possible method they were tracked that Narti would not ha—

He freezes in mid-thought.

Seconds feel like hours as he turns, slow and ponderous as an ancient waterwheel to stare at Narti. Acxa watches him with mute incomprehension and he wishes, for a moment, he could tell her to avert her eyes. They have been betrayed, all of them, but she shouldn’t have to watch him cut the traitor down, not when she loves Narti so.

Not when he loves Narti so.

Lotor lets his body move on instinct—muscle memory drilled into him from lesson after brutal lesson—and why didn’t he see this betrayal coming. His father and his witch, they always find some lever, some crack, to weasel their way into everything he’s ever built to destroy it.

He sweeps his sword up, but closes his eyes, just for a moment—right at the moment of impact—so he doesn’t have to watch her body crumple.

Lotor stares down at Narti’s lifeless body, spilled across the deck like a child’s discarded toy, and fights to feel nothing at all. Not surprise, not sorrow, not anything at all. 

He turns on one heel and walks away without a word. 

There’s nothing to say.

///

Allura remains quiet for a long time after he stops speaking. Lotor resists the urge to fidget with prodigious effort. He watches the slender line of her shoulders, the distant cast of her features, and fights not to curl in on himself when she blows out a breath.

“What alerted you?” She asks—soft and careful. If there’s judgement in her tone he cannot find the verdict.

Lotor’s not sure how to explain that he looked at Narti and seen the corruption sitting on her form like a mist. He shakes his head and looks away. “She was silent—no comment on our return, no greeting for her sisters, no analysis of the situation—nothing at all. Narti may have been mute, but she was never _silent_.”

He jerks when Allura lays careful fingers along his jaw, head snapping backwards with such force that he smacks into the high headboard of her bed. Allura quirks a wry smile at him and smooths a hand over the back of his head as if she’s checking for injuries. He can only watch her with wide eyes. Whatever reaction he might have expected, this is not it.

“You miss her?” Allura asks, softly.

“Is that even a question?” He asks in response. Allura cocks her head at him, eyebrow arching. He looks away for a moment before nodding. “Yes. Sometimes I wonder …” Lotor shakes his head. “No matter, it is done.”

“You wonder if it was the right decision?” Allura says, stating the obvious just to hear it said. “I imagine anyone would.”

“And still you trust me,” he whispers. “After hearing all this.”

She tugs his hair, a quick affectionate gesture. “You told me the truth, so, yes.” She pauses for a moment, thoughtful. “But if you hurt one of my paladins I will gut you. I don’t care what your reason is.”

Lotor can’t help his disbelieving laugh. “You shouldn’t trust me,” he says, voice raw. “I am a callous, wretched little chatelain. I bring nothing but ruin to everything I touch and all my plans are failures.”

Allura tugs his hair again. “You are melodramatic,” she says with a half-smile. “And I like you anyway.”

///

_And now. Let me tell you a story._

///

Kova jumps from her shoulder right as Lotor spins to face them, eyes widening in horrified disbelief. The buzzing in her head is an agony and the world tilts on its axis alarmingly. _No!_ says a voice in her head, a rasping whisper of frustration. _Not yet!_

Narti drops her arms as Lotor sprints towards her. If she had a voice to shout with she’d urge him on. 

She can hear the whispering rush of the sword as he swings it and Kova’s high yowl of rage. The shock of the strike is very sudden—a white hot burst of agony up her chest that swallows up every other pain. Her legs collapse underneath her, and she crumples as if all her limbs had suddenly forgotten how to function.

_Not yet!_ hisses the voice.

Narti wants to laugh, wants to click her claws together in smug delight, because the pressure and creeping dread are dissipating like fog under the noon sun. He’s free, she wants to think back at the voice whispering in the back of her skull, he’s free of you. 

_No_ , says the voice, a sibilant slithering presence in between her eyes. _I am not done yet_.

Death, Narti thinks, takes a very long time in coming.

She listens to Lotor walk away—the click of his heels against the deck of the hanger ringing out like shots. Her sisters take longer, she thinks Exor maybe has to pull Acxa away—there’s an odd hitching to her steps as if she’s stumbling over her own feet and Acxa is nothing if not graceful. 

Kova pats her fingers, butts his head under her hand, and she wants to smooth down his fur, but her body is heavy and cold. 

Narti doesn’t want to look through his eyes to see the shattered remains of her body, she can feel it well enough. Her chest burns like a solar flare, every nerve screaming as they die, and her lungs a sea of her own blood. She wonders distantly when the silence and the cold of death will come. 

_Not yet_

She has never been the impatient kind, but she would really rather die before the life support systems finally fail and the air grows toxic and frigid around her. She would rather slip into an endless sleep than suddenly be spilled, choking and coughing out ribbons of her own freezing blood in the vacuum of space. 

_Not **yet**_.

There’s an odd tingling flicker of energy over her body, as if she’d licked a cynogenerator, and then she knows nothing at all.

///

_So tell me. Where is the lie?_

**Author's Note:**

> Needed to get this one out before season 6 came to joss everything to hell and gone.
> 
> The Rashomon Effect is named after Akira Kurosawa's 1950's adaptation of Ryunosuke Akutagawa's short story [In A Grove](http://fullreads.com/crime/in-a-grove-by-ryunosuke-akutagawa/) which tells the story of a robbery, rape, and murder through the testimony of three different people. I strongly recommend both the movie and the story.
> 
> edit: post-s6 well, fuck.


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